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Much of the 2014 Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference focussed on how nonfiction writers can improve their craft by adopting the storytelling elements used by novelists – hanging the story on a lead character, developing a story arc, creating vivid scenes, narrating with strong dialogue, etc.

But Bob Shacochis changed the tide in his talk Sunday morning by asking whether nonfiction authors have anything of value to offer authors of fiction.

As a cross-genre writer of fiction and nonfiction, Shacochis is aptly equipped to answer the question. His response?

Research and research and more research.

Shacochis laments the narrowness of contemporary American fiction, which he says tends to focus on middle class boys and girls with insular struggles. They may suffer from divorce, breast cancer or injuries from a car crash, but they are untaxed by the political realities of the world and the history of those who lived before them.

Shacochis calls this the “literature of the uninterrupted life” and the domestic writings of “inwardness and political apathy.”

These aren’t unimportant stories. In fact, Shacochis says stories of domesticity can just as easily express the “divine cosmic dissonance that rings through the millennium from the crash of profound truths” as stories of political intrigue. What’s missing from the world of novels are writers willing to tackle stories that address the global political world.

He says fiction writers fear America is too immense to wrap their imaginations around, so instead they write about the provincial landscape where they feel at ease: the mall, the university, the farm and the small town.

But if the novelist were to adopt the nonfiction writer’s tendency to research and explore what they don’t know with confidence and courage, their world would expand – and so would their writing.

That’s how writers like Joan Didion, Earnest Hemingway and Robert Stone, who so effortlessly bridge the gap between nonfiction and fiction, generate the “literature of the political world.”

“These are writers who because of their parallel pursuits as journalists have learned to live the world on their shoulders,” he says. “And this is the gift that nonfiction gives to fiction.”

One reoccurring theme at this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference: the importance of hanging a complex narrative on a character who will pull the reader along through the story.

Three-time National Magazine award winner David Quammen talked about this Friday evening in his keynote address, saying people like to read about people, not statistics. This is especially important in science writing when it’s easy to loose the reader in a fog of incomprehensible data.

And Saturday keynote speaker Lawrence Wright also mentioned this in his explanation of the “donkey,” or the character on which he hangs all the information he wants the reader to know. Part of Wright’s reporting process is searching for the story’s donkey (In Going Clear, it’s filmmaker Paul Haggis).

But I thought the story Dennis Overbye of The New York Times shared in his casual conversation with Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post summed it up nicely.

Overbye spent five years in Woodstock writing a book about Albert Einstein that’s chalk full of dense explanations about the nature of the universe.

When people asked Overbye what he was up to holed away for long hours he answered straightforwardly, “I’m writing a book about cosmology.”

But that confused most people and they thought he might be talking about astrology instead.

So Overbye decided to tell them he was writing a book about Einstein’s love life. Suddenly, his book become immensely interesting. The local newspaper even sent a photographer to his house.

“They all quickly globbed up to the idea that Einstein was an [expletive] toward women,” said Overbye.

Yes, we want to know about the nearly ineffable nature of the cosmos, but we’d rather shrink the vast black space into a recognizable sphere peopled with characters we can comprehend, characters who render the material less formidable.

And there’s nothing like the amorous antics of a quirky scientist to do that.

Here’s some more tips on science writing from Overbye and Achenbach:

Overbye

* Pretend like you’re a 12-year-old and ask the kinds of questions children would ask.

* When trying to understand complex scientific ideas, ask the scientist how they explain their jobs and their work to members of their family. Most likely, they’re not using big words and referencing obscure theories when talking to their kids.

* Bring new information into a story gently and slowly. Overbye pretends he doesn’t know anything about the science he’s explaining until the character who’s pulling the story along discovers it.

Achenbach

* Develop a network of people who will help you when you’re writing about complicated topics.

* Science writing doesn’t mean you can be boring.

* Make the ending of a story beautiful.

And on that note, I’ll end with a quote from Achenbach that certainly is beautiful to my ears – and probably yours too if you’re a writer or aspiring writer of literary nonfiction:

“It’s the best time in the world to be a journalist. You have so many platforms! It’s so easy to get something published.”

GRAPEVINE – Texas Monthlywriter Skip Hollandsworth closed this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference (sponsored by the University of North Texas) with a hilarious, heartwarming tale of East Texas: about a beloved assistant funeral director, the little old lady he shot four times, and the town that rose up to defend its dear Bernie. Listening to Dallas-based Hollandsworth, a National Magazine Award winner (it’s the magazine equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize) tell about how he found the story of Bernie Tiede, reported it and (with the help of director Richard Linklater) turned it into a film was nearly as funny as the movie itself. Really, someone should have convinced Skip to take a cameo role as himself.

Skip Hollandsworth

Hollandsworth’s keynote speech Sunday afternoon topped the three-day, intense-but-exhilarating experience that is the Mayborn, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next year. It’s partially sponsored by The Dallas Morning News. If you have any aspirations toward narrative nonfiction writing, it’s the place to be every July in Texas.

So how does one find a story like Bernie’s, the kind of “I couldn’t make this stuff up” tale that, Hollandsworth says, comes along once in a lifetime for a journalist — and only if that journalist is lucky, and paying close attention? For Skip, it was through obsessive reading of metro briefs and obits in Texas newspapers. The Bernie story started as a three-paragraph brief in 1997 in the Morning News, which so intrigued Hollandsworth that he immediately headed to Carthage, near Longview, where the tale played out. He also admitted to being in a hurry to get there because he knew that then-DMN staffer Lee Hancock, who covered East Texas, would be all over it, and she was. The part that most caught his eye? That after Bernie killed town grande dame Marjorie Nugent, it was nine months — yes, NINE MONTHS — before, in a town of only 6,000 people, anyone thought to go looking for her. She was that thoroughly reviled.

Once in Carthage, Skip found prosecutor Danny Buck Davidson at Daddy Sam’s BBQ. “You call me Danny Buck!” he told Skip when he mistakenly addressed him as Mr. Davidson. “You ain’t worth **** in East Texas unless you have two first names.” Then the townspeople started talking, and Skip quickly applied the secret technique that he considers the hallmark of good narrative journalism: Get the tape recorder rolling, plaster an open, accepting look on your face, shut the heck up and just let the people talk. Being on the ground and muttering an occasional “Mmm-hmmm, that’s exactly right,” will get a reporter more good info than any number of absentee phone calls or emails.

Skip listened, and tape-recorded, as one after another of Carthage’s finest citizens defended Bernie. “Did you ever know a Christlike man, Skip? Can I call you Skip? Our Bernie was a Christlike man. … and we hated Mrs. Nugent,” one told him. ”If I was on that jury, Skip — can I call you Skip? — I’d vote to acquit,” said another.

The real-life Bernie Tiede and Marjorie Nugent (File, 2003)

Danny Buck, unable to control himself, interjects: “He confessed to shooting her! He shot her in the back four times! He’s a back-shooter!” When it came time to try Bernie for Mrs. Nugent’s murder, Danny Buck had to get a change of venue — this is the PROSECUTOR, mind you — to San Augustine, a whole 50 miles away — because he feared he could never get a fair trial in Carthage. Despite the evidence and Bernie’s confession, the townspeople were determined to “Free Bernie,” as some of the matrons took to shoe-polishing on their back windshields. (FYI, the change of venue worked: Bernie is now serving a life sentence, but visited often by the Carthagites who still adore him.)

Director Richard Linklater

Skip’s story was published in Texas Monthly in January 1998. Texas director Richard Linklater (Slackers, Dazed and Confused) asked him to work with him on screenplay. Skip agreed, but admitted he didn’t even read screenplays, much less ever considered writing one. So he wrote the scenes, and Linklater put them in screenplay format. Then the script sat on a shelf for 10 years, till one day out of the blue, Skip gets a call from Linklater that the movie is on, with Jack Black as Bernie, Shirley MacLaine as Mrs. Nugent and Matthew McConaughey as Danny Buck. The pure genius of the film, which became a hit in Texas but brought in a modest $9 million overall (it was made for $5 million) is that, just as Skip did in his story, in the screen version he and Linklater let the townspeople tell it. At least half of the cast consists of the real people of Carthage, conversationally relating their thoughts. “He only shot her four times, not five. You wouldn’t have liked her, either.”

The takeaway? If you tell a great story, Hollywood may come calling (although of the many, many Texas Monthly articles that get optioned, Skip says, 99 percent never get made into films). Got a great story? Show up, shut up and put on a “good face” that tells your sources you understand and care. If the film gets made, don’t expect to get rich. Most important: Never, ever make fun of your characters. “It’s so easy to get snarky, especially on something like this” that’s both Grand Guignol horrible and the blackest of black comedies, Hollandsworth say. But scorn will read on the page, and your readers will be alienated. Just tell it, and let the readers be the judges.

If I were looking for a theme to this year’s Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference — and after a night and a day being surrounded by great writers, you know that I am — I would say: This was the year the Mayborn broke my heart.

I mean that in a good way.

The sessions were consistently good, or better than good. Which is what the Mayborn organizers have trained us to expect. And for me, an unusual number of speakers today seemed to combine insightful nuts-and-bolts advice with emotional tales.

Several people mentioned Kelley Benham and Tom French’s session about the extremely premature birth of their daughter as particularly riveting. The couple drew laughs when Benham noted, like a true veteran reporter, that she she initially wanted to remain dispassionate and that she cringed at the idea of doing a mushy story about “the healing power of love,” to which her husband muttered, “God forbid we talk about the healing power of love.” But if you read her remarkable, wrenching series, “Never let go,” you’ll know why the room was enthralled.

Theirs was not the only session to focus on love. Bloomberg executive editor Amanda Bennett talked about meeting her quirky, clever, apparently wonderful husband — and then losing him to a rare kidney cancer. Her storytelling powers brought him to life with a few deft anecdotes, and made us feel her loss, too. She managed to tell her story while weaving in plenty of practical reminders for would-be memoirists. (“Just because it happened doesn’t mean it’s interesting.”)

Equally powerful was former Washington Post columnist Donna Britt, who spoke of her brother’s death under suspicious circumstances and her struggles to write about him (which she finally did in Brothers (and me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving.

And Rick Atkinson, who has written 750,000 words on World War II, made the sacrifices of the soldiers come alive in his forcefully delivered keynote address, which climaxed with a vivid description of repatriation of the deceased, the massive amounts of work involved simply in returning their sometimes blood-soaked personal effects to family members, and this admonition: That our first duty is to remember, whether you’re a writer or not. (More on him here.)

There was more, of course: Terrific tales of adventure that involved tigers and rapids. Heroic efforts to uncover horrific levels of sexual assault in the military. Hopeful accounts of business models that might, maybe, ensure that at least some writers have ways to make money in the online world. Not to mention Susan Orlean’s widely praised Friday night keynote.

But maybe you had to be there.

Ever-widening circles of journalists seem to be going there, to Grapevine, for the annual event. But I do wish that people outside of writer circles — particularly the ones who enjoy the stereotype of journalists as heartless, self-centered or careless — could have had a peek into some of the sessions. The speakers I saw today were obsessed with getting facts straight, to the point of discounting their own vivid memories if the record couldn’t back them up. Most of the audience of would-be or active writers probably understands that writing nonfiction is not likely to make any of them rich or famous. But they also are the type of people who believe that telling true stories vital, not just to society, but to their very humanity.

In short — they have heart. And broken or filled with encouragement, they also probably are feeling lucky to have spent the day here today.

If you have a pulse you’ve heard this year marks the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. The subject is a natural fit for the the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference, an event dedicated to the art of storytelling: If you were alive in November 1963, or maybe even if you weren’t, you have a tale to tell.

Three Dallasites told theirs Saturday afternoon at a Mayborn panel dedicated to the assassination. One of them was actually at Dealy Plaza that day. Hugh Aynesworth, who was the Dallas Morning News aviation and aerospace reporter at the time, wasn’t supposed to be part of the coverage team. “I was a little pissed off,” he told the Mayborn audience. “I thought I should have some part of this assignment.”

Soon, enough, he did. Aynesworth headed down to Dealy Plaza on his own, and when all hell broke loose he snagged a pencil from a bystander and started scribbling notes on the the utility bills in his back pocket. “I just thought, I’m a newsman, I better start talking to people,” he said. “I probably should have run.” Before long he was at Texas Theatre to see Lee Harvey Oswald apprehended in a flurry of action that he likened to a comic book scene.

DMN reporter Dave Tarrant was a Pennsylvania third grader when he found out at school; he assumed the assassination meant the country was going to war, and he ran home to get his plastic helmet and gun. Novelist Ben Fountain, a Dallas resident and the author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, was a five-year-old in his native North Carolina when he heard the news with his mother on the radio. “Are you sad?” the son asked the mom. “Yes, very sad,” the mom replied. “This was the first adult moment between my mother and myself,” Fountain said.

Fountain, whose field is literature, also got off the best quip of the discussion. “The first piece of fiction to come out of the assassination,” he said, “was the Warren Report.”

When Pulitzer-winning reporter Rick Atkinson began his epic series of narratives—nearly 750,000 words over three books—about World War Two, he realized he was tackling an oft-tackled topic.

The war, Atkinson said, is the most thoroughly-written event in history.

“It takes a stupendous amount of archival spadework to write narrative history well,” Atkinson told those gathered at the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

Atkinson delivered the conference’s Saturday night keynote address. This year’s theme is “Unearthing History,” a topic Atkinson knows well. The former Washington Post reporter just completed the third book in his Liberation trilogy, a series that takes readers through the war’s European, Italian and Sicilian and North African theaters.

The author told writers and supporters that narrative nonfiction writers have a special relationship with history, and that the stories of our past are too good to be left to novelists and playwrights. It all depends, he said, on a “tacit agreement” made with readers that the material is true and unembellished.

“The narrative nonfiction writer is seeking to provoke and empower the reader’s imagination,” Atkinson said, “Not in pursuit of the willing suspension of disbelief that a novelist or playwright seeks, but in hopes of a willing commitment of belief.”

The breadth of his topic meant he was forced to constantly ask himself why his story mattered.

“Keep your mind’s eye focused on what your narrative is really about at its core,” Atkinson said.

And for the author, that core was the human element.

“I write about war because war is a great revealer of character,” Atkinson said.

Atkinson said he struggled not just with carving out his own niche of story, but with the sheer volume of documentation on his topic. He didn’t interview living veterans for the story, relying instead on archival material.

The U.S. Army alone kept 17,120 tons of records, which he said was the equivalent to the payload carried by 17,000 B-17 Flying Fortress bombers.The author said that even as he waded through thousands of pages of his own notes, he was reminded why his work matters.

“The first duty is to remember,” Atkinson said. “Whether you’re a writer or not.”

If you’re in North Texas, and you love storytelling, good writing and long discussions at the bar about the nature of truth — you already know that this weekend is the Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

If you’re not attending, well, keep it tuned here, because we’re going to try to keep you updated.

First, you can see the full schedule here. And below, you’ll find links to stories we’ve done about several of the authors, such as:

Part of the appeal of the Mayborn, to me, is that seats are limited. I don’t know if it’s fair to call a 400-seat auditorium intimate, but you do get to know your fellow participants, and sometimes, this can be a lot of fun. (See these posts from 2010 and 2012 as evidence.)

But that intimacy means — if you’re serious, don’t dally, or you might miss out. Fees are posted here. If you’re a freelance writer — go sell some used books, or maybe some plasma. I’ve not heard anyone say they regretted attending.